When things fall apart

Every Sunday at The Free Press Douglas Murray writes about "Things Worth Remembering." This Sunday his choice is from T.S. Eliot's play, Murder in the Cathedral:

.... In the time between its first staging, in 1935, and the completion of The Waste Land in 1922, Eliot had recovered somewhat from the fragmented mindset that had defined his early work—though he would spend the rest of his life periodically confronting despair. His personal revival was in large part, or perhaps entirely, due to a personal religious revival. He converted to Anglican Christianity in 1927.

Murder in the Cathedral is shot through with the struggle against hopelessness. It is a dramatization of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, who was the archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century. History tells us that he clashed with England’s reigning king, Henry II, as church and state so often do. Many suspect that it was at the orders of the monarch that Becket was assassinated in 1170—in Canterbury Cathedral. ....

Murder in the Cathedral has lines as memorable as the most memorable lines of his poetry. The soon-to-be martyred Becket receives this warning, for instance, from a narrator, known as one of the Tempters, who come along to test him:

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

These lines require some thinking about.

But there is one passage from Murder in the Cathedral that I often think about, and sometimes say to myself. It is spoken by Becket, in a meeting with another of his Tempters. And although it may seem bleak, it is, to my mind, somewhat consoling:

We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The same things happen again and again.
Men learn little from others’ experience.
But in the life of one man, never
The same time returns. Sever
the cord, shed the scale. Only
The fool, fixed in his folly, may think
He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

We always live in tumultuous times. That seems to me to be the nature of things. As Eliot’s fellow convert, C.S. Lewis, said—in another speech I have quoted in this series—even the historical eras that seem most placid turn out, on closer inspection, to have been filled with alarms and crises. .... (more)

Douglas Murray, "Things Worth Remembering: T.S. Eliot Put His World Back Together Again," The Free Press, Oct. 27, 2024.